The Duchess

September 5, 2008 by admin  
Filed under Movie Previews

Set at the end of the eighteenth century, The Duchess is the story of the beautiful and, glamorous Georgiana Spencer, the most fascinating woman of the age.

While her beauty and charisma made her name, her extravagant tastes and appetite for gambling and love made her infamous. Married young to the older, distant Duke of Devonshire, intimate of ministers and princes, Georgiana became a fashion icon, a doting mother, a shrewd political operator and darling of the common people. But at the core of her story is a desperate search for love.

From Georgiana’s passionate and doomed affair with Earl Grey to the complex ménage à trois with her husband and her best friend, Lady Bess Foster, The Duchess is a very contemporary tale of fame, notoriety and the search for love.

Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys

September 5, 2008 by admin  
Filed under Movie Previews

Academy Award®-winner Kathy Bates and Academy Award®-nominee Alfre Woodard star as the matriarchs of two very different families being torn apart by greed and scandal in the contemporary drama “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Prays.” The sixth feature film by Perry chronicles the inner workings of two families-one upper-crust and the other working class-that become inextricably linked by scandal.

Wealthy socialite Charlotte Cartwright (Kathy Bates) and her dear friend Alice Pratt (Alfre Woodard), a working class woman of high ideals, have enjoyed a lasting friendship throughout many years. Suddenly, their lives become mired in turmoil as their adult children’s extramarital affairs, unethical business practices and a dark paternity secret threaten to derail family fortunes and unravel the lives of all involved. Alice’s self-centered newlywed daughter Andrea (Sanaa Lathan) is betraying her trusting husband Chris (Rockmond Dunbar) by engaging in a torrid affair with her boss and mother’s best friend’s son William (Cole Hauser). While cheating on his wife Jillian (Kadee Strickland) with a string of ongoing dalliances with his mistress Andrea, William’s true focus is to replace the COO of his mother’s lucrative construction corporation. Meanwhile, Alice’s other daughter Pam (Taraji Henson), a kind but no nonsense woman married to a hard working construction worker (Tyler Perry), tries to steer the family in a more positive direction.

While paternity secrets, marital infidelity, greed and unsavory business dealings threaten to derail both families, Charlotte and Alice decide to take a breather from it all by making a cross-country road trip in which they rediscover themselves and possibly find a way to save their families from ruin in “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys.”

Righteous Kill

September 5, 2008 by admin  
Filed under Movie Previews

veteran New York City police detectives on the trail of a vigilante serial killer in the adrenaline fueled psychological thriller Righteous Kill, directed by Jon Avnet (Red Corner, Fried Green Tomatoes) and written by Russell Gewirtz (Inside Man). The cast also features hip-hop superstar Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (Get Rich or Die Tryin’).

After 30 years as partners in the pressure cooker environment of the NYPD, highly decorated Detectives David Fisk and Thomas Cowan should be ready for retirement, but aren’t. Before they can hang up their badges, they are called in to investigate the murder of a notorious pimp, which appears to have ties to a case they solved years before.

Like the original murder, the victim is a suspected criminal whose body is found accompanied by a four line poem justifying the killing. When additional crimes take place, it becomes clear the detectives are looking for a serial killer, one who targets criminals that have fallen through the cracks of the judicial system. His mission is to do what the cops can’t do on their own — take the culprits off the streets for good. The similarities between the recent killings and their earlier case raise a nagging question: Did they put the wrong man behind bars?